On the Campaign Trail with UKIP
“There’s a woman who uses asparagus to see the future and she knows who’s gonna win.” Jim’s cancerous throat wheezes out this barely comprehensible sentence. It’s three weeks before the general election and I’m having gammon and shandy with a local UKIP faction in the West Midlands. I
Extreme Education: Inside the South Korean School System
Late at night, Seoul’s backstreets are the domain of more than just the homeless and the drunk. In most cities these particular nightwalkers would be an unfamiliar sight. From 10pm until the early morning children and teenagers can be spotted shuffling home, still in their school uniforms laden wi
Power Play: Vučić, Serbia and the West
On a Saturday afternoon in July 2008, Aleksandar Vučić organized a demonstration in Belgrade.15 000 nationalists attended, a small crowd by Serbian standards. They were protesting against the arrest and extradition of Radovan Karadžić, a former Bosnian Serb politician implicated in the Serbian g
Soumission by Houellebecq: Satire or Smut?
France has a history of producing bitterly controversial writers: Baudelaire the Sapphic Pornographer, Celine the traitorous Anti-Semite, and Derrida the Obfuscator. Today, that great tradition is embodied in slight, ailing frame of Michel Houellebecq, who is quite possibly the most controversial wr
Attack of the Drones: The Ethics of Modern Warfare
In the good old days, going to war meant travelling to where the war was. Pack your bags, don’t forget your toothbrush, say goodbye. For about five hundred US Air Force pilots, that inconvenience no longer exists. Their war is sedentary, carried out in rooms at Offutt Air Force Base on the line be
“If they see you, they shoot”: An Interview with a North Korean Defector
‘If they see you, they shoot’. Jung tells me about the soldiers stationed every 60 metres along the border he crossed to leave North Korea. ‘My mother was very afraid to leave’ he says, and it is not hard to see why. I meet Jung in a coffee shop in the heart of Seoul, just […]
New Bodies, Old Norms: Transsexuals in Iran
In the Islamic Republic of Iran, ‘male’ and ‘female’ are clearly defined oppositional concepts. Yet the country is also the world’s second most prolific practitioner of sex-reassignment surgeries. In 1985 Ayatollah Khomeini issues a fatwa stating that transsexuals should be permitted to ch
Video: No Platform for Marine Le Penn?
The ISIS talks about the ‘no platform’ strategy with activists, students and politicians at Marie Le Pen’s Union Speech